


a little closer to grace

by erebones



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death Fix, Emetophobia, Fix-It, Gen, Mild Gore, Pre-Relationship, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 02:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15281934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: Mollymauk was dead, to begin with. He wasn’t going to be, not for much longer, but no one knew it yet.





	a little closer to grace

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to make myself feel better, and hopefully some other folks as well. Hope springs eternal.

Mollymauk was dead, to begin with. He wasn’t going to be, not for much longer, but no one knew it yet.

They were frozen at first, the living who remained, as if the lingering chill of frost in the air had sunk into their bones. Caleb’s limbs felt like lead. His stomach churned as he stared at the place where he fell. Where he lay. _Mollymauk._

“Molly,” Beau said. The first to speak. Her voice sounded dulled and far away, moving further, like an echo passing through a tunnel. “ _Molly_.”

She led the way to the body. Caleb couldn’t bear to look, at first, and he thought for a moment that he might be sick. But Nott reached for him, took his hand, and they walked across the empty battlefield together.

He would have looked like he were sleeping, except that his eyes were open. Sightless. Blood stained his chin and spattered across his cheek where he’s spit it into Lorenzo’s face, and stained the front of his shirt. Caleb squinted and turned his head a little, trying to obscure his vision, but he could still see the wound from the corner of his eye, bone and viscera where the glaive’s edge had pulled up beneath his ribs. He had enough presence of mind to be grateful that it hadn’t punctured any digestive organs, and then he turned his head and threw up.

“Caleb.” Nott’s hand found his, again, and then her flask was pushed into his grip. Caleb wiped his mouth as best he could and drank deeply. He didn’t even feel the burn.

When he turned back, Beau was kneeling at Molly’s side, tucking the edges of his coat around him like a shroud. Caleb shuddered. Fists clenched, anger rising like hot bile bubbling up into his chest. But there were tear tracks on her cheeks, and her hands were shaking as badly as his, so he stopped. Breathed. Stepped around to her other side and put his knees in the dirt with the slow indignity of a much older man.

“Caleb,” Beau croaked. “You know a little bit about medicine, right? You read things. Do you—can you…”

There was nothing to be done, Caleb already knew this. But he went through the motions anyway. Fingers hard up beneath Molly’s jaw. Nothing. The back of his hand held carefully to Molly’s slack lips. Nothing. Caleb bent and peeled one lilac eyelid down, but the red sclera didn’t so much as quiver in response. His eyelashes, strangely pale and silver-colored—how had he never noticed that?—were still and unmoving.

“He’s dead.” Caleb heard himself say it, but the voice belonged to someone else. Surely. Surely this was all a terrible dream. He would wake up soon, cold and stiff on the hill, sandwiched between Nott and Mollymauk, a fine layer of morning frost over them all. And they would fight. And they would be victorious.

Beau sniffled and dashed her arm across her cheeks angrily. “He’s not. He can’t be. He.”

Old cruelty climbed out of his throat and took his tongue in a stranglehold. “He _what_ , Beauregard? Spit it out. He is dead, you can see so for yourself.” He swept his hand toward the tucked-up coat, not yet seeping through with blood, but Beau shoved him away before he could make contact. Hard.

“Shut the fuck up, Caleb.” She wasn’t yelling, though the force of the blow had been enough to send Caleb sprawling in the dirt. “He did this for me, d’you get it? He did this for _us,_ for all of us. He.” She was sobbing in earnest now. It was ugly. Her nose was red and running, tears ploughing dark tracks down her cheeks. Her fists clenched and quivered, and Caleb braced himself for the next strike. He certainly deserved it. “Molly, you stupid bastard,” she whispered, and sank back onto her heels. She bowed her head, and kept bowing, until her face was buried in Molly’s chest for her to pour her anguish into.

Caleb looked away. His skin crawled—fear and grief and rage all coalesced together and were gripped, silenced, choked down into a leaden ball that sat heavy in his stomach. _A circus idiot dressed in a rainbow_. He wanted to bite out his own tongue. _He was the best of all of us._

A little time passed, and eventually Beau sat up and stalked off, climbing the hill with her head bent and her staff digging sharp little holes in the soil to mark her way. Caleb watched her go until she disappeared over the crest. Wood thwacked against wood, arrhythmic like a stuttered heartbeat, but there was no other sound.

He pulled himself back up, piece by piece. Cold had settled on his shoulders like snow. “Nott.” He swallowed a few times, but his throat was dry as bone. Nott had been crouched at Molly’s side, staring intently but not touching. When he summoned her, she stood, took a long swig of her flask, and passed it over before padding silently in the opposite direction.

Then it was only them. Him and the corpse of Mollymauk Tealeaf.

“It isn’t fair,” he whispered to no one. Molly’s eyes were still open. The blood on his mouth was still wet. When he reached out and wiped some of it away, it was warm to the touch. Tiefling blood. Demon blood. It would take awhile to cool.

“Uhhh. S’cuse me.”

The voice was like a heavy metal rasp taken to his back. Caleb flinched away on instinct and then looked up. Keg, the dwarf woman, stood a little ways apart from the scene, eyes darting here and there—anywhere but the body.

“I’m. Sorry. Really, truly sorry.”

Caleb’s lip curled. “If there is—something. Anything. You can do, right now, to make sure that I do not kill you or die trying, you should probably do it. Now.”

It was a hollow threat, and they both knew it, but Keg did him the courtesy of not laughing in his face. Instead she leaned a little harder on her axe haft.

“I’m not a healer,” she said stiffly, eyes still askance. Like she was trying her damndest to give him privacy. “That’s not in my wheelhouse. But, uh. I might know a guy. Or know a guy who knows a guy. You know.” She waved her hand about, then shoved it into a pocket and pulled out a half-burned cigarette. “I don’t want to promise you anything, because it’s been awhile since I had my fingers in any pies up at the Run, but.” She chewed on the end of the cigarette without lighting it. “Maybe. _Maybe._ If we like, sell our souls and our firstborn children and do some shady shit. Maybe.”

Against his wishes, a tiny flame of hope licked awake in the depths of Caleb’s chest. He looked down at Molly, still sprawled on the ground. Eyes still red, still open. He reached out and brushed a lock of loose, curling hair out of Molly’s face. And lingered.

“Where?” he said.

“Shady Creek. The outskirts. There’s a weird old priest guy, runs a little temple out of the back of his hovel to a bunch of the illegal gods. So, you know. Hope you’re not… super pro-Empire, or whatever.”

Caleb heaved a dry, silent laugh. “I am not _pro_ anything.” His fingers caught in a delicate golden chain strung from Molly’s horn to his ear, and he took his time detangling it. Such care, such care. When he was freed, he laid his palm flat to Molly’s cheek. “We are all of us self-serving sons of bitches. Except for him.” The memory coiled in the grooves of his brain. Molly’s clumsy leap over the cart, staggering as he landed. The gesture, the movement of his lips. The burst of blood. And then.

“It’s gonna be a bit of a hike,” Keg said, slicing through the image like her axe through wet paper. “We’ve only got a couple horses.”

He knew something of revivify spells. It was one of many tracks he had pursued initially in his research, as soon as he was free of the asylum. He didn’t know much. Just enough to know that a cleric was required, and money, and sometimes more. He knew that they had some time, but not all of it. Only just enough to get them to Shady Creek Run and perhaps bribe or beg or torment a stranger into bringing back their friend. Their Mollymauk Tealeaf.

Caleb drew his hand away from Molly’s face and stood. “I am going to get Beauregard. You get Nott. We are going to put him on a horse and we are going to ride until we reach the Run.”

Keg bit her lip and nodded, hoisting her axe into place across her back. “Yes, sir,” she said. As if _he_ were the leader, now.

Caleb didn’t bother to correct her.

* * *

 

In the cramped back room of an old priest’s hut, on barren earth, behind a door locked and concealed with magic so powerful it made Caleb’s nose itch, Mollymauk Tealeaf woke up.

It went like this: a long, hard ride through wilderness, keeping out of sight of the road. A single evening’s rest without a fire, burrowed in leaves, with snow coming down in a thick white haze that slowly grew to blanket the ground. A hushed and desperate bargain in a crooked alley. Four people running through unfamiliar streets, blood hot, teeth bared. Desperate.

The favor was difficult, complicated, but not impossible. Not subtle, either. The Crownsguard outpost was burning to the ground as they wound their way back on Keg’s clever heels, keeping to the shadows. The required amulet held so tightly in Caleb’s hand the edges nearly broke the skin.

“We may have started somethin’ bigger than ourselves,” Keg whispered as they waited for a patrol to pass them by, shouting, running, illuminated by the far-off blaze and the unruly clang of alarm bells.

“Are you upset about it?” Caleb asked. He felt lightheaded and giddy, the end in sight. Three days of near-sleepless grief and horror now stoppered with the sick-sweet bloom of hope.

“Fuck no.” Keg spat on the ground and waved them on, the way clear. “It’s a hell of a way to come back. Wouldn’t want it any other way.”

 _Maybe_ , the priest had said, eyes glinting in the dark as yellowed, age-cracked fingers curled over and over themselves in thought. _I will do my best, but there is no guarantee._ It was enough for Caleb. He had been living just ahead of the knife’s edge for so long, a _maybe_ felt like a benediction.

Beau and Nott caught up to them at the next intersection, and together they found themselves back in the little closed-up garden with its heavy, pungent greenery and broken bits of glass and tile strung around like little fairy lights. They looked innocuous, but the charms woven into their construction sang in the back of Caleb’s teeth.

The ritual was a blur, mostly. If it were any other time, with any other poor sod laid out half-naked on the floor, Caleb would have paid near-surgical attention to each word, each gesture. But this. This was Mollymauk.

Mollymauk, now gone grey and ashen, each joint stiff and swollen in death. His eyes still open, but glazed over. Flies had started to gather toward the end of the second day, and so they covered him in a roughspun blanket to keep him from being violated, but now there was nothing—no veil between him and the people clustered at his sides, nothing to keep the ugly truth pushed to the backs of their heads.

Caleb fumbled for words in the close, too-warm room. Some in Zemnian, some in Common. A word or two of Infernal that he’d picked up, though it stung his mouth to speak it. He bit the place afterward and the blood that welled up was hot and coppery and satisfying.

He lifted Molly’s hand to his lips, though it took effort to battle the the rigor mortis. The snake’s eye seemed to stare balefully at him. A challenge. He pressed his lips to it anyway, leaving behind a bloody smear of his own.

“Come back to us, Mollymauk,” he whispered, so low he prayed the others wouldn’t hear. It felt too intensely private to bare to anyone but the corpse. “It’s not time yet. You have so much to do.”

Another few minutes passed in agonizing silence. The priest’s power clustered so thickly around them that Caleb could almost taste it. It coated his tongue like acrid tar, foul and saliva-slick, but it seemed a petty complaint when so much weighed against an unknown god’s favor.

The little coal in Caleb’s breast was beginning to flicker and grow cold when sharp, stunning heat filled the room. Light flared bright, blinding them, and even though he closed his eyes against it, Caleb felt tears streaming down his cheeks in retaliation. Something tickled at the edge of his hearing: low, baritone laughter. The kindly sort, a bit rusty at the edges, but honey-warm and familiar nonetheless.

Mollymauk’s body lifted off the ground slightly, shimmering and cloaked in light. His chest expanded—Caleb could hear the cracking of ribs being knit back together, could _see_ , where his loose shirt gaped open wide, the purple-red flesh binding, closing, pushing hot fresh blood out into the soil. Then he gasped for air. Eyes blinking rapidly like a newborn colt’s.

“ _Molly_ ,” Beau said, and burst again into ugly, wracking sobs as she flung herself across his chest.

Molly gave a weak cough. “Get… off… unpleasant one,” he wheezed. “I can’t… _ow_.”

Caleb sagged back onto his heels and put his face in his hands. The sound of laughter returned, twisted from what he thought he heard before into Molly’s gentle rasp and Nott’s piercing, delighted shrieks. It was too much. Too much. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled out the door into the garden where the air was cold and smoke-saged.

There he breathed. And thought. And breathed some more. He barely noticed when the old priest tottered out, a little glint of silver beaming as he tucked something into his sleeve. The old man did not ignore _him_ , however. He came and sat beside Caleb in the dark and weeds, long tufted beard stirring slightly in the wind and old gnarled hands tucked up beneath his arms. Caleb braced himself for unwanted conversation, but none was forthcoming.

“Thank you,” he croaked at last. His throat burned with ash and cold. He smothered a cough into his sleeve. “I cannot begin to say…”

“Then to do not say,” the priest interrupted. Each word was clipped and coarse, carefully chosen. The man was strangely fastidious in his speech for someone with such a wild look about him. “A favor traded for a favor. You owe me nothing, and I owe you nothing.”

Caleb nodded and bowed his head, chin tucked into his scarf. For a moment he considered summoning Frumpkin, then remembered he was still an owl. It was still Frumpkin, but without the cat form… it just wasn’t the same.

“Can I ask you something,” Caleb said suddenly, curiosity pricked anew.

“You may ask,” the priest crisped. “I will not promise to answer.”

“You have. Many gods, here,” he said. “You let many people come to pay their respects. To worship. Which one of them do you call yours?”

“ _My_ god? Oh, he is not very well-known.”

“Try me,” Caleb challenged. He had not even properly looked at the amulet they retrieved from the Crownsguard’s stash, not with the flames crackling all around them, but a suspicion had been kindled in his mind, born of laughter and the smell of warm tar. 

The priest peered at him sidelong, a glint of something in his eye that was suspiciously like merriment. “He has many names," he said, low and lilting like a happy secret. "But I prefer to call him the Traveler.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the song "Smile" by Mikky Ekko.


End file.
